I married at 20 in 1974, and while I had a basic knowledge of cooking thanks to my food-loving parents, being in total charge of making sure there was food on the table for two people every day came as a bit of a shock.

After all, I had other things to do. There were two part-time jobs (one in a university office and one at a local restaurant–an old school red sauce place, by the way) and I went to school full time. I had a million books I wanted to read (and did) and I sang wherever and whenever I could. There were friends to hang out with, walks to take, dreams to make. And I had to student teach sometime if I wanted to graduate! What a body-blow it was to assume most of the burden for shopping, housework, and laundry because, well, that’s how things were despite my finest efforts to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. There were more than a few battles over those things, you could rightly assume. Perhaps an issue or two still occasionally floats to the surface because, well, I guess life has to remain interesting and we’re sometimes still working something out. (Who is cleaning out the laundry room this week, by the way?)

If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know I have a stack of much-loved French cookbooks that are surely the stuff of which dreams are made…well, at least my dreams. I’m not as much of an armchair cookbook reader as some, though there is always a stack next to my reading chair–even at Christmas. Maybe especially at Christmas. (List of said books upcoming on a blog page. I promise.)

When one thinks of French food, probably things like wine, cheese, croissants, baguettes, fruit tarts, foie gras, French fries, Coq au Vin, or fill in the blank come to mind. I’m here to tell you that those things are assuredly there and in spades; you’d be right.

You may not share my approach to living.I’m most happy and feel terribly rich when there’s a big pot of something luscious bubbling on the stove–especially on a snowy day.

Enough to feed 12 is about right. And maybe there’s a bottle of wine airing on the table with glasses perched just within reach. A fresh baguette wafting its bouquet throughout the kitchen. Salted butter, of course. Paris Café music on the Bose, as we’re just back from France:

On a night when the world reeled from the Paris attacks— and from the unending hate and carnage we seem to constantly face (Do we humans desire to end our world?) — I had planned some sort of a pork chop dinner. That said, you’ll imagine I had a couple of great big, thick babies unthawed (1 1/2 -2-inches thick) and a few vegetables basking on the counter waiting to see what I’d do with them. I kept one eye on the tv and another on the sauté pans. I began without a perfectly clear idea, but it quickly came into focus: tender, rosemary for remembrance-scented pork snuggled up to garlicky spinach and cozy mashed sweet potatoes, to which I added a regular Idaho potato. A lusty French-style white wine-mushroom sauce tied the whole thing together. Why not? Love was the key, the answer here. Wasn’t it?

Quote of the Day: Love

THE LOVE FOR equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.

The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.

The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.

And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.

-Originally published in The Magnificent Defeat by Frederick Buechner

And I can’t help but think of the hundred of thousands of Syrians already killed in this horrific time. No one has changed their Facebook page to mourn them. Last count was 250,000, I thought–but as I researched it that number might be just a little too high. Here’s what I found.